Security news has not been, shall we say, “uplifting” as of late, what with massive personal account breaches at Gawker, Sony, and a handful of other companies. While we hate to be the bearers of bad news, we feel it’s part of our duty as a security software company to keep you informed about these unfortunate events, especially when they force a company’s entire site offline.

The latest company to suffer a break-in is Codemasters, makers of some popular PC and console games like Dirt 3 and Race Driver: Grid. The company emailed customers on Friday, June 10 to warn about the intrusion, though it actually happened about a week ago. Codemasters believes the hackers gained access to the Codemasters.com website, Dirt 3 VIP code redemption page, corporate site, and subdomains, as well as a slew of personal details from the Codemasters EStore database including customer names and addresses, usernames, encrypted passwords, email addresses, telephone numbers, date of birth, XBox Live Gamertags, and order history.

The other downer about this particular incident is that, because the hackers gained access to the Codemasters.com backdoor, the company has actually taken its entire site down and is redirecting users to its Facebook page. However, as of this writing, Codemasters has yet to publish this notice on that page.

The good news is that Codemasters was storing user passwords in an encrypted database, though we don’t have details on what kind of encryption was used. Still, we hope affected users weren’t using their password on multiple sites, and that if Codemasters customers haven’t discovered 1Password yet, they may have a good reason to check out our Mac, PC, iOS, and Android apps.

Any thoughts about the Dropbox authentication bug? And I don’t mean forum posts. Put something on this blog. Agile has promoted Dropbox as its preferred cloud storage solution for 1password users. Your company’s silence on this issue is deafening….